Agenda item

The Group considered a comprehensive report presented by James Barrah

Director of Housing and Communities), Chris Brown (Assistant Director –

Development and Regeneration), Ian Candlish (Assistant Director, Housing

Property), Simon Lewis (Assistant Director, Housing and Community

Development), Shari Hallett (Housing Performance Manager)

Comments / questions from group members included;

·       For the lateral flow testing, would our staff be able to self-test for Covid instead of going over to the Blackbrook Leisure Centre? We have put in an application for this on the Gov website and are just waiting to see what happens with our request for front facing roles;

·       With regards to Stronger Somerset and the One Somerset proposals are there any advantages/disadvantages with either of these proposals in terms of housing services? There is a difference between the east and west side of the County. On the west side we have ourselves and Sedgemoor who have retained stock. On the east side the stock had been transferred many years ago. Whichever model is successful there will still be a concentration of social housing and social housing business on the west side that would need to address and continue to operate that with HRA Ring Fence and all those things that will still apply. Therefore the scale of that business would be more significant for an east-west split so for a West unitary with that entity would have more prominence and a very local presence for those communities by the staff that we have in the activities that we undertook in the community whereas for a one unitary model you could see that it’s of less significant because it gets a little bit more diluted in a much larger entity. There were overlaps we want to make to support our customers so the more vulnerable customers in particular linking with the current County Council services, adult social care and children’s services and those principles would still apply and would need to be strong so that we are able to join up effectively across the public sector and across both unitary models would allow us to do this; 

·       HRA - Zero Carbon Pilot, why was the procurement process not successful? Last year we aimed to deliver 50 0 carbon home, there had been a lot of learning done from the pilots and the specification which was developed for that pilot had been used the Seaward Way tender which had just gone out to the market so it’s already operating as a pilot in delivering some real useful thinking and useful documentation. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful in a procurement process for volumetric modular supplier. There were a number of reasons why this failed, a key reason seemed to have been the ability of the volumetric modular industry to be able to deliver zero-carbon homes, air tightness and other issues were quite a challenge. Unfortunately we were unable to find another contractor but we did go out and see a number of contractors and visited their factories but we thought that the market was still not mature enough for us to use that process so we were now turning to using traditional construction of Panel I systems and other modern forms of construction;

The Director of Housing and Communities gave his personal thanks to the group members on behalf of the whole team for all their hard work. 

Recommended that the group note the content.